You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

The Bush administration was an interesting time for conspiracy theories, because most of them were true. They weren't even really conspiracy theories, to be honest. Bush would do something horrible, we'd say Bush was doing something horrible, it would be denied that Bush was doing something horrible, it'd be proven Bush was doing something horrible, but by that point horrible had been normalized and now the argument was that the horrible thing was good and necessary.

Which is why I find Obama-era conspiracy theories so fascinating. And I'm not even talking about Victoria Jackson sunbathing naked* and penning heat-stricken ramblings about Obama sending the New Black Panthers to rape us all with hammers and sickles. I'm talking about conjecture by supposedly legitimate members of society that is not only completely fucking ridiculous grassy knoll rantings, but doesn't even have an internal logic holding it together. I've been collecting quite a few of these lately, and I may feel a theme week, or at least a theme couple of days, coming on.

Take, for example, Bill Randall. Bill Randall wants to be a congressman from North Carolina. I know that's stretching the definition of "legitimate member of society", but, you know. Dude wears a tie and has the wherewithal to print a bunch of lawn signs. Which makes him more officially legitimate than someone who smells like pee, shouts at anyone who sits near him on public transit, or writes for Big Hollywood.

So anyway, Randall is running as a Republican and courting the teabaggers, which should counterintuitively work for him, since he's black and they all need to pretend they're not racist. Plus, he says things like this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Now, I’m not necessarily a conspiracy person, but I don’t think enough investigation has been done on this."

OK, let's stop right there. The but after "not necessarily a conspiracy person" is one of those great, round, firm buts you only find in political discourse. I love them. I cannot lie. It's kin to the "but" from "I'm not a racist, but..." How does saying that help your case? "Now, NORMALLY, I don't bother subscribing to paranoid theories in which shadowy government figures or agencies engage in secret behavior to further their own ends, but..." So what, exactly, needs more investigation? Let's continue.

"Someone needs to be digging into that situation. Personally, and this is purely speculative on my part and not based on any fact, but personally I feel there is a possibility that there was some sort of collusion. I don’t know how or why, but in that situation, if you have someone from a company violating a safety process and the government signing off on it, excuse me, maybe they wanted it to leak."

Oh. The oil spill. He's talking about Obama colluding with BP to actually manufacture an oil spill. To what end? He doesn't say. I mean, one could say, and this is purely speculative on my part and not based on any fact, but one could think that Obama wants to move everyone to Commie Clean Power, and so an oil spill is just the thing to really get the hippies moving on the whole gay wind farm idea. So that's why Obama would want an oil spill.

But why would BP participate in this scheme? They're not even American. Plus, they're an oil company. They're not going to help Obama bring about the end of oil. Did Randall actually believe all of BP's ads about being planet-friendly and "beyond petroleum"? That's even dumber than him thinking bad things about Obama.

But then there's his trigger for this - BP violating safety processes and the government "signing off on it". Does he not know when that happened? And for how long it's been happening? And which former/current oil-men were in charge of the country while all that was going on? Did he forget about the Minerals Management Service drug and sex parties? I think we should investigate why that happened too, but I bet Randall wouldn't actually enjoy that. Anyway, Randall didn't stop there.

"But then it got beyond what was anticipated, and we had an explosion and loss of life. And, oh man, then we have panic. Is there a cover up going on? I’m not saying there necessarily is. But I think there’s enough facts on the table for people that (they) really need to do some investigative research and find out what went on with that and get a subpoena of records and everything else."

Hey, remember what I said before about internal logic? How can something be simultaneously not based on any fact, and justified by "enough facts on the table"? I'm guessing it's the same internal consistency he uses to try and say he's not saying something while he's saying it.

Also, someone needs to tell Randall that "necessarily" is not a "get out of consequences free" card for saying stupid shit. He dropped it twice in three paragraphs like he was Harry Potter and it would summon a glowing, white specter of a lawyer to protect him from accusations of being a fuckwit. Well, that's not how things work here. OK, that's how they work on cable news, but anywhere outside a mystical land where reality operates completely differently, that shit doesn't fly.

*And yes, avid Big Hollywood watchers, that is the ONLY reference I'll be making to the latest edition of Vicki's oeuvre.